


No Time to Explain

by illumynare



Series: Destiny Drabbles & Ficlets [1]
Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Gen, fireteam heartbreak, the best line in the game FIGHT ME
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2018-11-08 08:50:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 3,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11078163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illumynare/pseuds/illumynare
Summary: "I don't even have time to explain why I don't have time to—"An archive of miscellaneous Destiny drabbles and ficlets. A lot of Eris/Toland, and some OCs.





	1. Scars (Eris/Toland)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by @ir-anuk's [post](http://ir-anuk.tumblr.com/post/161339114589/if-eris-has-scars-under-her-veil-wouldnt-it): _"If Eris has scars under her veil, wouldn’t it itch?"_

When Eris was three minutes Risen, in a dusty room full of skeletons, she sneezed and could not stop.

When she was a Hunter, and filled with the Light, she crouched in the shadows between two rocks and waited, waited motionless for the Fallen Skiff to move, as ants crawled across and bit the back of her neck. But the hunt was more important, so she did not even twitch.

When she was lost, she huddled between two mounds of chitin, and the air burned in her throat, blistered welts in her skin. But Eris was still, was still, as her face rotted and changed, because she knew that was the only way she could survive.

Now, as Crota’s Bane, she stands at the entrance to Underwatch. Her scars itch beneath her veil, and she cannot scratch them, not while the Guardians (who already think her mad) are looking. Her eyes ache, and her feet are weary, are weary, and the shadows echo Toland’s voice to her.

 _Eris,_  he sings, in every moment, in every night, _Eris, come rest with me, awake with me. Eris, are you tired of these simpletons yet?_

But Eris is a Hunter and Hunters do not sleep, do not rest. The Warlock Thanatonauts, they seek wisdom in oblivion. A few Titans have found bliss in the roar of destruction. 

Hunters?

They watch.

Eris watches, and endures.


	2. Stars (Eris)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by @destinywaits's [headcanon](http://destinywaits.tumblr.com/post/160701747422/a-cool-and-implausible-headcanon): _"After being brought back from death, Guardians get small glowing star tattoos where their wounds used to be. Over time, as Guardians survive more and more ordeals, their bodies become adorned with constellations- a living reminder of what they have endured."_ And @ir-anuk's [addition](http://ir-anuk.tumblr.com/post/160717793684/a-cool-and-implausible-headcanon): _"Gradually, more and more of Eris’ marks were covered up with rot and scars."_

There are no calendars in the Pit. No day or night. No Ghost to bid her good morning as it raises her, or chide her for the time she wasted lying dead.

Eris keeps time by the fading of her stars, one light after another going out. Her wounds scab over now, and heal with dull ridges of lightless scarring. Sometimes there is no wound, but the Dark sinks into her skin and rots the stars from the inside out.

The last star (on her hip, from a Fallen Captain’s saber) goes out after she spends too long in a Wizard’s filthy miasma. She chokes for hours after, and hears whispers of the Dark when she exhales, and the last light on her skin is gone.

But before she sleeps again, she will finally climb out to stand beneath the stars.


	3. Kitty kitty (Ikora, Cayde)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tfw you start a crackfic and then run out of steam. I have neither explanations nor excuses for this.

**Cayde-6** : Ikora! My favorite Vanguard! I can explain everything. Number one, it’s not my fault. Number two–

 **Ikora** : What are you talking about?

 **Cayde-6** : Oh. Oh, uh … Number two, I don’t know either. Nope, no idea what I’m talking about. Everything’s fine here. Say, didn’t we get some exciting sensor readings from the Dreadnaught lately?

 **Ikora** : …

 **Cayde-6:** Look, in my defense, nobody would have expected the artifact to do that.

 **Ikora** : … Does this have anything to do with why Eris is missing?

 **Cayde-6:** She’s … right behind you.

 **Ikora** : Cayde, that is a _cat_.

 **Cayde-6:** Weird, huh?


	4. Fireteam Heartbreak, Described as Cats

Eris is a small gray cat with white paws. She steps carefully, daintily, from corner to shadow to corner, and always knows exactly where her tail is moving. She is the only one who has never knocked anything over. You have not known shame until she has narrowed her eyes and licked her paw at you.

Toland is a Siamese cat, long and languorous and disdainful, who cannot be made to stop talking. If you try to go to the bathroom, he yowls outside and sticks his paw under the door. If you try to cuddle him, he claws your arms, writhing like an eel, and vanishes. 

(He is also that black outline of a cat, seen only in the corner of your eye, never there when you look. He is nothing and everything. He purrs only in your dreams)

Eriana is a Bengal, with crisp dark rosettes and a pelt that turns molten gold in the sunlight. She can open all doors. She has robbed the bottom of the trash can. All cats in the house submit to her. She swats Toland with her paw, and every day she lays a paw on Eris's flank and washes her face.

Sai has long white fur and blue eyes. She looks like she belongs on a limited edition china plate, and she flays the skin off anyone who tries to pet her. But if you are very lucky, one day when you are sitting on the couch, you will feel warm little paws on your shoulder, and Sai will curl up beside your ear and purr.

Omar is an orange tabby who cannot be kept indoors. He knows how to pop out the window screen so he can range across the neighborhood, fighting all comers and climbing to impossible places. He has been viral in video and GIF, on YouTube and Tumblr. But he has a kind heart, and after he flees, he always returns with a dead mouse as an apology.

Vell is a Maine Coon. He weighs more than Eris and Sai put together, but his voice is a tiny mew. He will cuddle any human, and any cat except Toland. He will chase the laser pointer for hours. His feet sound like thunder on the stairs. One time a rat got into the house, and Vell fought it across the living room and the hallway, and tore its head off. For his courage, Eriana licked his ears. 


	5. Look Up At The Sky (Eris/Toland)

Toland warned them–glancingly at first, and directly later, when they wandered lost below the surface of the Moon.

_Look up at the sky._ There is no tenderness in the stars, neither in the sword-logic. Those who would prevail, must express their love only in ferocity.

This was not a thing that Eriana’s fireteam could do.

Vell had nightmares, of those pilgrims he had failed to bring safely to the City. Omar waked him, and Sai handed him hot tea, and Eriana listened to him.

Eriana wept for the hosts dead at the Mare Imbrium, of course. But she also wept for the studies and experiments she had abandoned to seek vengeance. And Omar told her that the Hive was new data, and Sai told her that Guardians were a useful control group, and Vell clapped her on the shoulder and said, _Do not despair._

Omar woke gasping—no one was ever quite sure why. Perhaps it was the Ahamkara bones bound to his wrists. But Sai steadied him, and Eriana hummed songs of the Light to him, and Vell punched him in the face when he seemed distant.

Sai never wept or gasped or screamed that anyone noticed. Like a cat, she wound about the edges of their group, flicking her metaphorical tail. And like a cat, they loved her, gave her cream—or glimmer, and first shot at filling Vanguard bounties—and all of them would have died for her.

And Eris?

Lonely, awkward Eris?

( _You are not like them,_ Toland whispered, stroking her wrist. _They do not know you,_  Toland said, and pinned her lips with his.)

Deep, deep, below the surface of the Moon, Eris looked upon the Darkness, upon a Wizard who wanted to shape her according to the sword-logic, and she accepted those eyes, that vision.

She is glad that all her fireteam (except Toland) died before her–because if not, she would probably have hunted them, in those early days. She would have torn them apart for the Hive, and never entirely regretted it.

But they were dead.

They all died bravely, true to themselves and to the Light, and Eris is grateful for that as she ascends the Dark.

Whatever she is, whatever she hungers, Eriana and Omar and Sai and Vell are all beyond her reach, to help or harm.

She hopes that someday, the rest of the Tower and the Guardians will be there too.

(Toland, she does not hope that for. Toland, she wants to tear apart with her own fingers, before she kisses him one more time.)


	6. Sleepless (Eris/Toland)

Sleepless, she watches.

Toland is snoring already, the noise of his breath soft and wet—how grossly corporeal he is asleep, thinks Eris, and then her heart chills between her ribs. That is not a Hunter thought. 

Perhaps not even a Warlock thought. Eriana-3, crafted out of metal, her mind a living maze of ones and zeroes, does not disdain human flesh so much as Toland does—when he rants about other planes of being, when he whispers of Hive spells, when he swallows coffee and then herbs from Venus so he can work without sleep for a week.

Sleeplessness is a Hunter trait. A true Hunter, like Eris, needs no drugs nor secret lore to stay awake.

They are camped outside a Hive nest at the southern edge of the European Dead Zone. In a past age, it was called Spain. In a past year, Eris patrolled here with Omar, and they ate oranges from the trees together.

Now, Toland snores against her hip. Tomorrow, the two of them will try to capture a Hive Knight, to test the runes that Toland has developed to help them in the Pit. The day after—

Her heart jumps.

Carefully, Eris pushes the hair out of Toland’s sleeping eyes.

Soon, they will descend. Perhaps not the day after tomorrow, nor the day after. But soon. Sparks crackle between Eriana’s fingers; she is short and angry now, even with Eris, now that the death of Crota is so close to her reach.

Now, though.

Now, Toland’s sleeping form is wrapped around her. Now, Eris keeps watch, the strength of the pack and the eyes and the teeth as well (she has no illusions about how well Toland could handle himself in battle). Now, she dreams of a day the Moon does not hang over them as a challenge, but as a memorial only; a day that Eriana can laugh without blaming herself for Wei Ning, that Toland can kiss Eris without whispering a parable of three queens and their logic.

Now: but not yet.

Eris wakes, and watches, and waits.

 


	7. What Might Have Been (Eris/Toland)

If she hadn’t loved him, it would have ended the same. 

If she hadn’t loved him, she would still have trusted him.

Eris tells herself this, often, as she wanders alone in the Pit. As she stands in the Tower after. She carves the knife of her conscience through her memories, scrutinizes each instant. She puts herself to trial, and she judges: in every world, she would have trusted Eriana. And so she would have trusted Toland.

But in another world, some few things might have been different:

The evening before they descended, when their drinking and their toasts were done, Eris would have gone alone to her room. Or she would have stayed with Eriana, to comfort her in the last night of her unavenged grief. She would not have followed Toland to one of the top terraces of the Tower, would not have leaned her head on his shoulder (that he allowed it was more intimate than all their kisses) and listened to him mutter drunkenly to himself until she fell asleep.

Deep in the Stills, after Alak-Hul had cloven Vell in two with his Darkblade, and the waves of Thrall had drowned his Light beyond raising—Eris would have given Omar more than a simple hand on his shoulder, as he mourned his friend. Or she would have edged closer to Sai, and asked her to demonstrate the invisible twist of her knife that she used when surviving the Darkblade's attack. She would not have gone to  Toland and gripped him by the neck, her gloved thumbs pressed to the rim of his helmet, and let her head drop to touch his. 

(The gesture was comfort and threat, trust and suspicion, all at once. Eris hadn't understood what she was doing in that moment—had only known she needed to grip him—but later she did. Later, she remembered when the Cursed Thrall had blossomed with self-destroying light around Vell, and how their reflection had glittered in Toland's visor. She understood that was when Toland had begun his last madness, the final transformation that Ir Yûr made complete.)

When they lost Eriana and Sai, Eris would have doubted Toland's guidance a little sooner. She would have sent him away, instead of losing him in the darkness as she fought through waves of Thrall. It would not have saved Omar, except by chance—Eris is aware, always, of how narrowly she escaped, how easily one of her companions might have been the one to live, _oh Eriana if only you had lived—_

The real change would have been this: after Omar's death, Eris would have been alone. She still would have whispered the record of his death to her Ghost. Nothing could have made her unfaithful to her fireteam's memory. But when she was finished speaking—when she crouched between two rocks and wept—Toland would not have come back to her. He would not have pulled off the cracked ruin of her helmet and wiped at her tears with gloved thumbs at once gritty and slimy. She would not have sucked in the unfiltered, sour-musty-sweet air and resigned herself to the taste. She would not have kissed him—a raw, clumsy kiss with teeth scraping at cold lips, drawing blood and hunger and a desperate, ferocious will.

And they would not have huddled silently against each other after. Eris would not have drowsed against his shoulder, would not have dared hope—however briefly—for a world where they were fugitives together. 

She would have learned to live without hope a little earlier, if she had not loved Toland.

But—

In any world—

“You still would have taken the eyes from me,” says Toland. He sits on the ceiling of her bedroom, arms crossed, a shadowy, disdainful imprint on the world.

“Oh?” says Eris. Her door and her shutters are locked; she is unwinding the bandages from her face, the only light in the room a little glowing pot of wormspore—and his eyes, and hers.

He makes a noise half harrumph _,_  half deathsong. “Such ambition you keep pent-up in this Tower of sluggard simpletons. You undid Oryx, the king of such puissant reality that he undid entire species. And yet you seek to calculate other worlds, as he never did."

It is the most human thing left about her, the wondering over might-have-beens. But Eris does not say so as she sits down on her bed. She knows Toland: silence is the best goad.

"Your musings keep me awake, sometimes," he admits, a little petulant. "But they are futile. In every world, Crota's Bane, you had the will to live.”

Eris remembers the first greedy, ferocious breath she drew when her Ghost raised her.

“That is not news to me,” she says, and it is not. She has known that since she walked out of the Pit, since she put the Emerald Light bond upon her arm, since she listened to Toland rave of the Three Queens (and kissed him after), since she fought her way out of the Mare Imbrium, since she killed her first Fallen. Since her Ghost woke her.

_Hello! I’m your Ghost. And you—well, you were dead, but—there was a Light in you that didn’t want to stay that way._

Even without her Light, Eris is Eris still. She wills to live, and fight the Dark.

Even before he lost his Light, Toland was Toland.  

That is what would drag tears out of Eris, if she still had eyes that could weep them. In the end, it does not matter how much she did or did not love Toland. She could never have saved him, as he could not have broken her.

Still—

Now—

Eris lies back on her bed, stretches herself out against the sheets. The night air is cool against the ruined skin of her face. The darkness is kind to her eyes as she gazes up at Toland. 

She cannot undo the equations that have wrought him into this, a thing of darkness and hollow scorn. He cannot undo her will that holds her in this Tower, among creatures of the Light who do not trust her. And yet, and yet—and yet _because_ they cannot change each other, they have this freedom: to delight in each other. To caress the ever-undeciphered runes of each other's minds, until their vows and longings summon them elsewhere.

"Are you going to perch there all night?" she asks.

And she knows he has been lonely, because he does not even try to mock her. He drifts down from the ceiling, settles beside her, and she feels the mattress dip as he commits himself to this plane.

"I will keep watch," he says, and winds his fingers about hers. 

Eris, satisfied, closes all three of her eyes.


	8. Blood & Bone (Eris/Toland)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by [this tumblr post](http://illumynare.tumblr.com/post/164732369106/massivelimestonecube):
>
>> ARE YOU A BONE OR BLOOD PERSON.
>> 
>> ARE YOU A VOID OR ABYSS PERSON.
>> 
>> ARE YOU A ROT OR DUST PERSON.

Eris is the bone, jagged and stripped raw and honed into a knife.

Toland is the blood, poured out and clotted and turned to old stains.

Eris is the void, the seething darkness that Guardians twist into a form of light.

Toland is the abyss, the dizzying endless depths and the urge to leap into them.

Eris is the rot, the strange, stubborn life that crawls inside dead things.

Toland is the dust, dry and haughty and drifting slowly down in long-abandoned rooms.


	9. First Death (Ikora Rey)

Ikora's first death was in snow.

Not, of course, the death that ended her first life. That death—like all Guardians, even the Thanatonauts—Ikora cannot remember. 

But the first time she died after her Ghost found her, it was on a snow-covered mountain slope as the wind whipped up snow and drove it into her face. Ikora had been hiking across the mountains for days, toiling her way towards the Traveler.

("What is the source of the Light?" she asked her Ghost as the sun hung low and red on the horizon, the first evening after her Rising. 

"The Traveler," said her Ghost. "I don't know much about what it is, but—it made me to find _you."_

"Take me to it," said Ikora.)

Her Ghost had complained that the path was too steep, too dangerous. That she should wait until the storm subsided. But Ikora had begun to sense the Traveler's presence—a humming, phantom awareness that sang at the very edge of her senses. It called her forward, and she had to—not exactly obey, but _know._

So Ikora followed, and did not wait. And she died between two drifts of snow, the cold and the wind and the weariness driving her to her knees as she thought, _Surely I can rest one moment._

The storm had lull to a hum in her ears. Her limbs were heavy and warm. In the next moment, she died.

_(and she saw darkness and the Void, and the Arc-light power of the storm that she would not learn to harness for another hundred years—)_

_(there were secrets and secrets and worlds within death, within darkness, and she was both the question and the answer—)_

An eternity later, as her Ghost's Light stroked down her spine and hooked under her ribs, Ikora lived again.


	10. Warding (Eris/Toland)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nemonus said: _Eris + Toland + sunset walks along the edges of the tower, half tryst and half warding._ And then I wrote this.

Her feet make soft, definite sounds against the stone.

His make none against the air.

Eris walks the edges of the Tower, and Toland the Shattered—violating his exile, but visible only to her—walks the air beside her. His ghostly fingers brush hers, and a static spark runs up the bones of her arm, a gross corporeal response to his haunting. 

When Eris pauses to whisper invocations deep in her throat, Toland slants her a look of disdain. “What Hive do you expect will come here, except the army of Savathûn? Such a host would tear even your spells apart.”

Eris hums, acknowledging his rebuke and wrapping it into her spell at the same time. It is not Savathûn she seeks to prevent—that will be the task of the Vanguard, the Guardian, the Light—she only wishes to seal the Tower against Savathûn’s eyes, her stray thoughts and her casual malice.

_Let this be a place she must conquer,_  Eris thinks.  _Let it not be hers by right._

She finishes her chant and falls silent. Toland, hovering in the air just a breath away, frowns slantwise and raises his hand.

Eris raises hers as well.

Both their palms halt an inch away, the air thickened and sparking to resist them: her spell, enforcing the walls of the tower. Keeping even the subtle darkness of Toland out.

Eris feels a moment of regret, that he will no longer appear in her room, a nightmare grown welcome through familiarity.

She feels a moment of triumph, that he is thwarted now.

“This is nothing,” says Toland, fury in his ghostly eyes. “It will avail nothing, when Savathûn—”

“It is  _now_  that I am guarding,” says Eris, and leaves him raging in the air outside the Tower. It is time for her to speak with the Guardian about Osiris.


End file.
